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Two Bard College Faculty Members Named 2025 Guggenheim Fellows

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded 2025 Guggenheim Fellowships to Bard College Assistant Professor of Photography Lucas Blalock ’02 and Bard College Visiting Artist in Residence Gwen Laster. Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 3,500 applicants, Blalock, who teaches in the Photography Program, and Laster, who teaches in the Music Program, were tapped based on both prior career achievement and exceptional promise. Bard MFA alum Jordan Strafer ’20 was also named Guggenheim Fellow for 2025. As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.” Blalock, Laster, and Strafer are among 198 distinguished individuals working across 53 disciplines appointed to the 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows.

“At a time when intellectual life is under attack, the Guggenheim Fellowship celebrates a century of support for the lives and work of visionary scientists, scholars, writers, and artists,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “We believe that these creative thinkers can take on the challenges we all face today and guide our society towards a better and more hopeful future.”

In all, 53 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 83 academic institutions, 32 US states and the District of Columbia, and two Canadian provinces are represented in the 2025 class, who range in age from 32 to 79. More than a third of the 100th class of fellows do not hold a full-time affiliation with a college or university. Many fellows’ projects directly respond to timely themes and issues such as climate change, Indigenous studies, identity, democracy and politics, incarceration, and the evolving purpose of community. Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded over $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 fellows. The 100th class of Fellows is part of the Guggenheim Foundation’s yearlong celebration marking a century of transformative impact on American intellectual and cultural life.

Lucas Blalock is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, Hammer Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Portland Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. Recent solo exhibitions include Florida, 1989, at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York; Insoluble Pancakes, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; and An Enormous Oar, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; recent group exhibitions include venues in Oslo, Miami, Moscow, Berlin, Beirut, Minneapolis, and New York, where his work was selected for the Whitney Biennial 2019. He and his art have been profiled in publications including Arforum, the New York Times, New Yorker, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, W Magazine, British Journal of Photography, and Time. He has published essays and interviews as author in the journal Objectiv, IMA Magazine, BOMB, Foam, and Mousse, among others. He previously taught at the School of Visual Arts; Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University; Sarah Lawrence College; and the MFA Program at Ithaca College. He also served as visiting lecturer on visual and environmental studies at Harvard University. He received his BA from Bard College and MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Gwen Laster is a nationally acclaimed musician who has been the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Jubilation Foundation, Puffin Foundation, Arts Mid Hudson, Lila Wallace, and the Cognac Hennessey 1st place Jazz Search. A native Detroiter, her creative influences come from the Motor City’s exciting urban and classical music culture. Laster started improvising and composing because of her parents’ love of jazz, blues, soul, and classical music, and her inspiring music teachers from Detroit’s public schools. Laster relocated to New York City after earning two music degrees from the University of Michigan. Laster is many things: A virtuoso violinist with exquisite taste. An adventurous composer, arranger and orchestrator. A classically-trained artist with a deep appreciation for America's musical history, and a scholar of African-American musical heritage. A socially conscious activist and educator who understands the power of music to reach and touch everyday people.

Post Date: 04-15-2025

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Professor Joshua Glick Writes About AI in Film for the Los Angeles Review of Books

Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Joshua Glick critiqued the movie Here in the Los Angeles Review of Books. He considers the movie through the lens of its use of AI, finding that the film’s dependence on the technology mirrors “an embattled film and television industry in dire need of creative reinvigoration and struggling to find a path forward.” Glick analyzes the film’s machine-learning AI, which lets Here represent thousands of years across time and de-age its two main actors: “while Here aimed to be a proof of concept for how AI could be ethically applied to a project at a moment when labor unions, cinephiles, and a wary public have risen up against it, the film once again exposed its fault lines.”

Glick has taught at Bard since 2022 and his research focuses on comparative histories of film, television, and radio and the use of emerging technologies. In 2023, he wrote about the emergence of AI in Hollywood for Wired Magazine.

Post Date: 02-17-2025

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Filmmaker Ephraim Asili Named a 2025 United States Artists Fellow

Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, associate professor and director of film and electronic arts, has been selected as one of 50 artists to receive a 2025 United States Artists (USA) Fellowship. Each year, individual artists and collaboratives are anonymously nominated to apply by a geographically diverse and rotating group of artists, scholars, critics, producers, curators, and other arts professionals. USA Fellowships are annual $50,000 unrestricted awards recognizing the most compelling artists working and living in the United States, in all disciplines, at every stage of their career. 

“My approach to filmmaking is both hybrid and experimental. My films often alternate between essayistic or observational documentary form, narrative fiction, and self-reflexive gestures which foreground how the film medium itself, and the filmmaker using it, frame lived experience,” says Asili.

Ephraim Asili is an African American artist and educator whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. Often inspired by his quotidian wanderings, Asili creates art that situates itself as a series of meditations on the everyday. He received his BA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University and his MFA in Film and Interdisciplinary Art at Bard College. Asili’s films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, The Berlinale, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Asili’s 2020 feature debut The Inheritance premiered at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival and was recently the focus of an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art where it is a part of their permanent collection. In 2021 Asili was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. During the summer of 2022 Asili directed a short film Strange Math along with the 2023 Men’s Spring/Summer fashion show for Louis Vuitton. In 2023, Asili was the recipient of a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, and in 2024 Asili was awarded a grant from Creative Capital. 

Sancia Miala Shiba Nash '19 and Drew K. Broderick MA ’19 of kekahi wahi also won a 2025 United States Artists fellowship. kekahi wahi was instigated in 2020 by filmmaker Sancia Miala Shiba Nash and artist Drew K. Broderick. The grassroots film initiative is committed to documenting transformations across the Hawaiian archipelago and sharing stories of the greater Pacific through time-based media. 

Post Date: 02-03-2025

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Filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, Artist in Residence at Bard, in Conversation with Alum Connor Williams ’18 for Interview Magazine

Kelly Reichardt, S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence at Bard College, spoke with Bard alum Connor Williams ’18 for a profile in Interview Magazine. “Reichardt’s body of work is remarkable for its consistency in quality and creative vision,” Williams writes. “She simply hasn’t made a film that wasn’t great.” In conversation with Williams, Reichardt discusses what she’s learned from her first film jobs years ago, her long-lasting collaborative friendships, and introducing students to her understanding of the cultural and cinematic canon. “I just wouldn’t really be connected with that generation if I didn’t teach,” she said. “I like being around young people and being in the flow of that conversation.”

Post Date: 08-06-2024

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“What would be the Asili method?” Professor Ephraim Asili MFA ’11 Interviewed by ArtReview

“The first question they ask when you want to start making a film is: who is your target audience?” said Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, associate professor and director of film and electronic arts, in an interview with ArtReview. Touching on topics as broad as the history of the avant-garde and the three-act structure functioning as a “cage,” Asili was also asked what defines the “Asili method.” His answer was that it all came back to that question of audience and, for Asili, the desire to make movies that would please him as a viewer. “I want to make something to the best of my ability that is compelling to me, as compelling as I can make it for myself, and then I assume that it might be interesting to other people.”

Post Date: 07-30-2024

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Bomb Magazine Interviews Artist and Filmmaker Tiffany Sia ’10 about Her New Book, On and Off-Screen Imaginaries

Bard alumna Tiffany Sia ’10 thinks and works across text and film. Her newest book, On and Off-Screen Imaginaries, is a collection of six essays that grapple with the complexities of post-colonial experience. The first three essays focus on new Hong Kong cinema and examine the national security policies, censorship, surveillance that followed Hong Kong’s mass protests in 2019 and 2020. The second half of the book “abruptly drifts toward other geographies, specifically the US, as I challenge how dominant Asian American aesthetics conceive of a falsely unified imaginary of Asia and its politics,” says Sia. She reimagines the work of Vietnamese American photographer An-My Lê in one essay and the work of Taiwanese filmmaker King Hu in another. “The essays trace a shift in my focus beyond Hong Kong––toward the ‘elsewhere’ sites of the Cold War, such as Vietnam, Taiwan, and even Lithuania and Turkey, in brief mention––and facile East-West tensions to illuminate a lattice of North-South tensions and their vexing histories and politics,” says Sia, who recently won the prestigious 2024 Art Baloise Prize, which carries an award of approximately $33,400.

Post Date: 07-09-2024